The use of FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt) is common in politics and, especially, on the Left. A particular and deliberate Leftist strategy seems to be to suggest a danger so immense that we simply cannot risk that danger, no matter how low the probability—and never mind that the danger might have been outright invented by the Left or, worse, actually matches something that the Left, it self, is trying to do.
The last seems to be another deliberate Leftist strategy: accuse an opponent of doing exactly what the Left is doing in order to distract the public, to make accusations against the Left seem less plausible, to create a word-against-word situation, or similar.
(With reservations for unknown motivations. It is, for instance, possible that various accusers are blind to their own hypocrisy or see an act as justified when it is done in favor of a Leftist cause but not when in favor a non-Leftist cause.)
Consider e.g. the (recent at the time of writing) 2024 POTUS campaigning and various wild accusations against Trump, notably that he would be Hitler re-incarnated (a common charge against Republican POTUS-candidates) or that he would be a threat to democracy (while the Democrats are the ones working e.g. to hinder voter identification, to weaken the separation of powers and the checks-and-balances central to the U.S. system, to put power in the hands of the unelected).
Proof has so far been absent and the claims lack plausibility, but even a slight risk of a second Hitler (etc.) can certainly scare many. By analogy, there is a chance of five-in-six of surviving a round of Russian roulette unscathed—but few are willing to take the remaining one-in-six risk of death or grievous wounding. The hitch, however, is that we do not have a metaphorical revolver on our hands. Instead, it is more of a “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” situation—a made up and implausible claim that might scare a sufficiently naive child, while leaving a sensible adult unfazed. Likewise, a general thinking in terms of “expectation values” is very legitimate, but the expectation values must be calculated with realistic probabilities and outcomes—not those made up by partisans. Moreover, even the risk of a disaster might still be acceptable, if sufficiently rare/unlikely, as when we accept a minuscule risk of death (much, much smaller than one-in-six) when traveling from point A to point B.
A particularly egregious historical example is the infamous and grossly unethical “Daisy” advertisement that painted a picture in which a Goldwater presidency would have brought on a nuclear war. Whether the associated election (1964, POTUS) would have turned out differently without that disgrace is impossible to tell, but I do note that the U.S. ended up with another four years of one of its worst ever presidents (LBJ)—a man who in that very year pushed the U.S. into Vietnam, further and very considerably deepened the U.S. involvement during his second term, and, among other failures, pursued ruinous economic policies that made the U.S. ill prepared to handle e.g. the 1970s oil crises. Goldwater, in contrast, might have been something akin to a Reagan-for-the-1960s, had he been given the chance—and, failing that, would have still have been highly likely to do better than LBJ actually did. All in all, a steep price to pay in order to avoid a claimed-by-the-Left threat with no serious backing. (For the sake of precision: Here, “threat” implies a threat arising from specifically Goldwater that would have increased the already existing and/or perceived threat of nuclear war.)
Whether the U.S. involvement in Vietnam was a good or a bad idea, I leave unstated. (I can see both sides of the issue.) However, there is a striking hypocrisy when one candidate institutes warfare and the other (!) is painted as a war threat—that alone justifies the mention. (Moreover, if irrelevant to this text, the U.S. involvement was poorly implemented.)
Another interesting point is that the, maybe, closest that the U.S. ever got to a nuclear exchange was the Cuba missile crisis, during which LBJ was the veep and which took place in the very election cycle that originally, with the Kennedy assassination, brought LBJ to power and made him the incumbent for the 1964 election.
To throw a wider net, move from nuclear war to nuclear power. Here portions of the Left have focused the debate mostly on the risk of accidents, despite these being very rare and despite fossil fuels doing more damage on a yearly basis than nuclear accidents throughout the history of nuclear power. Worse, the potential damage has often been exaggerated beyond what is even remotely reasonable. For instance, I have repeatedly heard claims that a nuclear accident would cause a reactor to undergo a multi-megaton explosion. For instance, one of my first contacts with nuclear power, when I was 5-ish, was my mother explaining that an accident in a somewhat nearby nuclear plant would leave us all dead, with no chance of escape. (To avoid misunderstandings, I am not accusing my mother of propagandizing. I use her as an illustration of how common exaggerated ideas about nuclear power are and/or were.) Other distortions are common, e.g. in that the natural disaster that surrounded Fukushima is suppressed, be it by failing to note how it did far more damage than the nuclear accident or how it took an immense external force to cause that accident in a plant not having the flawed and outdated design of Chernobyl.
What remains outside the “mostly”? In Germany, at least, the remaining debate seems to deal with how nuclear waste would invariably leak from whatever end-storage is chosen and cause untold damage—if it makes it to end-storage at all, avoiding the inevitable seeming train crash or whatnot that would spill tons of nuclear waste on the way.
Issues around nuclear waste are, in all fairness, more legitimate than the accident propaganda. Even here, however, the issues are overblown, e.g. because what might happen is assumed as a near certainty, because the different character of later generations of nuclear reactors and waste is not properly considered, and because the assumption of virtually permanent end-storage is made. To the last, note that science has long had strong hopes of e.g. being able to treat nuclear waste better in the future than in the respective past and that by now, 2024, very large advances actually have been made in this regard, which makes the idea of having to store nuclear waste for aeons (until it grows harmless through decay) a potential misstep. Throughout, again, also note how well nuclear waste compares in its current effects relative the pollution from fossil fuels.
Issues around mining of uranium and whatnot usually go entirely unmentioned for some reason, despite having considerable (but still much smaller than fossil fuels) negative side-effects.
Or consider various (other) claims around the environment, climate change, global warming, or whatnot: Instead of approaching the debate with science and scientific arguments, the “climate Left” prefers exaggerated horror scenarios, up to and including variations of “!!!If we do not act !!!NOW!!!, the world will end within ten years!!!”. (So far, such panic-mongering has not been borne out by later developments, while more reasoned, factual, and limited claims often have matched reality or reality-but-for-intervention.)
Here we see a particularly good illustration of the problem: Even someone very skeptical of such claims might be worried or influenced, because even a slight risk of the world ending might not be acceptable. What “slight risk” is acceptable will depend on the individual at hand, but I suspect that most would be very averse to even a one-in-a-thousand risk (I certainly am). We then see thoughts crawl up like “Yes, X is a fanatical moron, but even a blind hen finds the occasional corn—and what if she just happens to be right?!?”. But let us try this in reverse and say that “If we cut down on carbon dioxide emissions, then various plants will yield less food than they do today, and then millions will starve to death. Do you really want the death of millions on your head?”. Should we now take this made up (by me, during writing) claim and conclude that we cannot take the risk of reducing carbon dioxide emissions?
While the claim is made up, it does (just like e.g. the more typical panic-mongering around too large emissions) have a basis in truth, in as far as there are strong signs that many plants have prospered from the increase in carbon dioxide.
This shows the importance of ignoring the panic-mongering and sticking to what is sufficiently scientifically plausible, to have a holistic view and consider both advantages and disadvantages of any change, etc. (And note that I do not argue against, say, the existence of a greenhouse effect—my target is panic-mongering, great exaggerations, and similar unethical and anti-scientific approaches.)
Ditto COVID and claims like “Unless we do X, countless millions will die!” (or, on a lesser scale, “Unless you take the vaccine, you will kill your grandparents!”). There were no true indications that COVID would be as bad as some claimed, and, looking back from 2024, it simply did not live up to the claims of the panic-mongers. Indeed, it might well be that the counter-measures, in the long-term, took more lives and/or years-of-life than COVID—and almost certainly so when we look outside the risk groups. (No, I am not talking primarily about adverse vaccine reactions. Consider, instead, missed or delayed cancer diagnoses, loss of years of life through stress or economic hardship among the, mostly, still living, and other indirect effects.) And this when looking just at health issues and ignoring the many other negative effects of the counter-measures.
Yes, COVID could have been a super-killer—but so could any yearly influenza. A mere “could”, without considerable signs of actual probability, is simply to vague a ground to take such drastic actions. Otherwise, we will just end up doing more harm than good on the balance. Indeed, many, yours truly included, correctly foresaw dire consequences on e.g. the economy that were outright likely—much unlike the immense dangers claimed from COVID. (Again, with reservations for risk groups.)
A potential reservation around COVID:
In an older text, I noted that:
I have long toyed with a (hopefully) hypothetical scenario: If (!) the lab-leak hypothesis is true, if (!) the virus resulted from gain-of-function experiments, and if (!) world-leaders knew of this, then it would explain the extreme and disproportionate reactions. They might then have known that the original virus was problematic and that the modified was worse, but, critically, they might not have known by how much. Of course, other explanations have to be found for the continued overreactions after the first few weeks or months of pandemic.
This while the recent report by the U.S. House of Representatives (partially discussed in a separate text) does not just point to a lab leak as a likely origin but also to a considerable chance that the likes of Fauci were well aware of this likelihood. (Contrary to their protestations at the time, which make later protestations lack credibility and evoke Shakespeare’s line “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”) This, especially, with an eye at gain-of-function experiments.
I do not necessarily consider this a likely explanation, even in light of the report, but I see it as more likely now than at the time of original writing. Moreover, other potential explanations might be even more depressing, including gross incompetence and irrationality among key decision makers and a deliberate Machiavellian move of some sort.
As occurs to me during writing, there is a potential parallel with a pet hypothesis of mine—that some superstitions might have been outright created for the purpose of ensuring a wished-for-behavior. For instance, mirrors were once very expensive and a threat of seven year’s of bad luck might (or might have been believed to) bring a superstitious servant or a child to be extra careful around mirrors. For instance, walking beneath a ladder might well bring an actual risk (e.g. that the ladder is tipped over or that the walker is hit by something dropped from on high), but if someone is not receptive to an explanation of such risks, maybe a threat of bad luck does the trick.